High-Class Professional: Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme GTX 280

Cooling solutions of that size equipped with 3 fans at a time are pretty rare even for CPUs. But today we are going to talk about a cooler like that designed for a … graphics card! Read more about the VGA solution from Arctic Cooling in our new review.

Today AMD Radeon HD 48x0 graphics cards seem to be in much greater need for efficient and quiet cooling than Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-285. The reference coolers of the AMD solutions are much noisier; besides, the PCB of these graphics cards heats much more than the PCB of the GTX solutions. Nevertheless, the new extreme cooler from the Swiss Arctic Cooling Company is designed for Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-285, which is clearly indicated by its model name: Arctic Cooling Accelero Xtreme GTX 280. However, Arctic Cooling also has a VGA cooler for the dual-processor Radeon HD 4870 X2, which suggests that they may soon launch an Accelero Xtreme for Radeon HD 4870/90 as well. But today we are going to talk about a new cooler for GeForce GTX 260-285 graphics cards, will compare its cooling efficiency and acoustic performance against that of a reference cooling solution.

Package and Accessories

As usual, Arctic Cooling product is sealed in a clear plastic casing molded following the cooler shape:

As a result, you can see the front of the cooler. The back side is covered with paper insert with the technical specifications and two comparative diagrams for the cooling efficiency and noise. Besides the cooler, there are also aluminum heatsinks for the voltage regulator components and memory chips, sticky thermal pads, a set of retention screws and an installation manual:

Moreover, there is an additional heatsink plate for the voltage regulator elements and a plate for the back of the card, which we are going to dwell on later in this review.